Beautiful winter time-lapse shot at -25 degrees

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Above is one of the best time-lapses we’ve seen in a while. It was taken during a cold South Dakota winter, featuring amazing skies, haunting buildings, and some really stunning scenery. Visually it’s rather stark, but the lighting is hugely impressive and the movement adds tremendously to the overall effect. Watch the video, it speaks for itself.

If you hadn’t noticed, two things that go extremely well with time-lapse photography are dollies and the night sky. That latter is obvious: we know the stars are moving in the night sky, but it’s only with the magic of time-lapse that we can actually see them do so (unless if you are really, really patient). Stars moving across the sky and the blossoming of flowers are real crowd-pleasers in the time-lapse world, but the pros really like to introduce movement as well, and this means a dolly. Using a dolly with a timer, like the one from Dynamic Perceptions, a mounted camera can move slowly and steadily as it takes its pictures. The effect adds a lot to lapses as the camera is no longer stationary so the videos seem to be much more alive.

In the video’s notes the photographer, Randy Halverson, points out that not only was a dolly used but so was a Milapse mount. If you are curious about that piece of hardware (I was) it’s a Meade DS telescope mount with programmable motion controls. It’s basically a 2-axis tripod mount that works with a computer controller and can be rigged to then mount a DSLR in order to add timed pan/tilt controls. These go perfectly with a time-lapse if you want to added side-to-side or up/down motion, plus the mount can be combined with a dolly to make things really interesting. More on the $249 MiLapse kit here.

Curious about the more standard equipment? Halverson used a Canon 60D and a Canon T2i for shooting and then a Tokina 11-16mm and 17-55mm lenses. It’s definitely a budget setup compared to the Canon 5D MK IIs and L series glass usually used for lapses, but the result is clearly top notch. As for the typical process, 20 second exposures (on a one second interval) were taken in RAW format.

Halverson wrote that he usually shot for about 300 frames, which means about an hour and 45 minutes of shooting in the cold, not including what must have been lots of setup time.